SOftware Engineer - Civic AppsLocation: Philadelphia, PA

Overview

Azavea is a Philadelphia-based civic technology firm that uses geospatial data to build software and data analytics for the web. They are looking to grow their Civic Apps team that develops custom web and mobile software for visualizing and analyzing data related to water management, urban forests, ecosystem services, land records and digital history.

They are looking for a software engineer that is passionate about building applications that will have a positive impact – someone interested in public service, but not necessarily in working for a government or a non-profit organization. Someone who thrives on working in a variety of technology environments, and wants to build visually slick applications that have well-engineered architectures and provide a responsive user experience.

Azavea is a B Corporation committed to working on projects that have social and civic impact and advancing the state-of-the-art through research. Customers are local governments, non-profit organizations and academic or federal research projects. They build custom apps; perform geospatial analysis; manage several open source civic software projects (DistrictBuilder,OpenTreeMap, and others); and develop an open source, high performance computing framework, GeoTrellis, that enables them to build fast analytical applications by distributing the geospatial data processing. Developers work across the technology stack from database and application servers to modern, browser-based front-ends.

The Civic Apps team implements a broad range of custom web and mobile applications related to municipal government and non-profit organizations, including: visualization tools for Civil War emancipation data; the largest environmental transformation of storm water management in the world; a huge historic photo database; visualizing urban socio-economic indicators in Toronto; and helping The Nature Conservancy distribute information related to coastal resilience. In addition to these projects, the team’s work also includes the open source OpenTreeMap product, a web-based application for crowd-sourcing tree inventories and modeling ecosystem benefits.

What You’ll Do

Implement application code, APIs and web or mobile clients based on wireframes and designs developed by our UI/UX Design team.

The Philadelphia office is located in a brightly lit office on the 4th floor of a converted factory building in the Callowhill neighborhood, a short walk from Center City, the Reading Terminal Market and SEPTA subway and regional rail stations. For bicyclists, they have in-house bike parking, a shower and lockers. It’s an open office plan with several smaller rooms for team meetings, private space and concentration time. You get a top-end Linux workstation, Mac or Windows laptop with a pile of memory for VMs and extra monitors. They have flex-time to deal with personal stuff, and most employees work a 40 – 45 hour week on a regular schedule. After the first six months, developers can also spend up to 10% of their time on a geospatial open source, professional development, or R&D project.

They offer a salary commensurate with skills and experience and a benefits package that includes:

Fully subsidized health care, dental, prescription plan, including for spouse/partner and children

Medical reimbursement plan to cover what the health insurance does not